Rolling 2014 Thread on Race

but I couldn't exactly follow what IMLosted was trying to say tbh

I try to clarify that whole issue for men who catcall/hit on me by being as mean as possible right off the bat. Because I am just that helpful! You're all welcome, btw.

A friend of mine, when asked, "What do you think are some effective strategies against catcalling?" said, "Tasers. I think the answer is tasers." Which is turns out it's illegal for civilians to carry tasers in NYS but we're working on it.

i got heckled on the street yesterday and it's definitely a good thing i didn't have a taser

"gang members," "street people," and "drug addicts" are going to imagine them as being made up of Black ppl so it's just super unhelpful at the very least? (Esp gang members, altho maybe West Coast ppl are more used to seeing white homeless alcoholics or something, I don't know.)

haha gtfo this is a ridiculous assumption

1) guys who take a friendly gesture as an indicator of romantic interest are OF this class of people - whether they live like a street person

i think I M Losted accidentally left off "or not" at the end of this. if that's right, i guess the point would be that guys that take a friendly gesture as an indicator of romantic interest, regardless of economic class, can be grouped together with gang members, drug addicts, and street people as...people who are lacking social skills (?)

??? Do you think that most white people don't assume "gang members" are black? I'd be willing to let "homeless" go but I'd even bet on "drug addicts"!

I would say that in any given metropolitan area there are gang members, homeless people and drug addicts of all ethnic groups. this is certainly true of where I live (which is yes, the west coast)

sorry but wtf does i m losted mean when he says "street people"

I...didn't say that wasn't the reality, though. I said that I would bet that most/a lot of/do you really want to argue about this? wite ppl would mentally picture a gang member or drug addict as Black.

idk what the pt is of assailing theoretical strawmen who automatically assume all gang members, homeless people and drug addicts are black. Sure these people exist but let's not let extrapolation get outta hand here.

Oh my god it was in the context of saying, maybe this isn't an effective way to talk about the problem also it doesn't make sense in the first place, so jesus christ ease up.

it puts the emphasis on class rather than race, which may be relevant. or maybe not idk. these things are all knotted up together. "rich white people harass like THIS" lol

HARASSMENT IS ALSO NOT ABOUT CLASS IS THE THING HERE.

the kind of street harassment we're talking about might be, though... and hard to avoid with this subject?
like generally rich/white/whatever people do their harassing in other places if i go by the standard stereotypes, unless you're talking about, I don't know, Italian construction workers or whatever

"Ayyyyyyy, BOSCHK!"

Me, yesterday:

The story about street harassment of white women is really also the story of gentrification. Do all races and cultures harass? Obv, because they all are shaped by patriarchy. But white men, with, on the whole, educational and economic privilege, may do their harassing in other spaces than the street, like the office or job site or in the home to their domestic laborers--and when young white women move into majority-minority neighborhoods, their experience of SH can be almost completely that of being harassed by Black and brown men whose home community they are now living in.

Maybe like 10-12 years ago, another white woman made a SH doc called War Zone where she took a (non-hidden) camera around various cities and tried to talk to the men who harassed her. Some of those cities had a majority white poverty class who were more vicious and obscene than any of the New York PoC she spoke to, and some of them had white-collar men on their lunch break who harassed her even harder than non-white men but were way more ashamed of it when they got recorded/confronted.

To be more specific in light of today's posts the "white-collar" men in question were iirc all white but I haven't seen the movie in a long time so I might be overlooking other people in a group scene where office dudes are sitting outside eating lunch. And in any case street harassment happens regardless of either race OR class/employment/whatever.

hey guys guess what
http://news.yahoo.com/woman-seen-harassed-nyc-streets-video-gets-rape-180905117.html

The nightmare scenario is that somehow Gamergate merges into this

kinda feel like it already is

eh i don't think so

i asked my students* to define and give examples of street harassment today and they were 100% on it -- examples, animated discussion, laughing/stories, the whole thing. they asked about the video, they knew all about it.
my guess is that they don't know what gamergate is and if they did, they would not care

SH is way bigger
that's kinda why i think the infighting "the problem with the problem with" rhetoric/position jockeying is annoying to me -- that video was really effective regardless of how PROBLEMATIC it was
"the conversation" is going on -- there's no way to control it; better to encourage it to continue and fret about who's doing it better behind closed doors
imo

*14 young women 18-24, 1 young man in the same age bracket, all Latina/o/Hispanic aside with one exception and she grew up in Turkey

Are there any other videos out there doing the same basic experiment as '10 Hours'? I bet a bunch are going to start popping up in the next week.

LL, that is like EXACTLY what I was saying in a clusterfuck facebook thread about this today -- I think I even used something to the effect of "The Problem With The Problem With..." "Position-jockeying" is exactly how I feel about a lot of the response, as much because of the tone ("This stuck up white girl doesn't even see her privilege!") as the actual content. I agree, video was effective, particularly in showing just how pervasive and commonplace this is.

this ebony article on it was good

I liked the Lemieux article too and shared it on fb today but it doesn't address race at all--in fact, maybe unsurprisingly given the outlet is Ebony--it addresses the reader w some implicit assumptions of Blackness.

Why do they think all Caucasian women living in cities are "moving into" some POC community?

Got news for you - in urban areas, not all "street people" are brown-skinned.

Why don't these people get off their behinds and go to some REAL places.

Not every Caucasian woman in the city is the Central Park Jogger.

I'm not your loathed stupid middle-class white woman. I grew up in a white ethnic and working-class urban area.

I'm glad I allowed you to feel smug and superior. Why do you assume things? Yes, I grew up with gangs and drugs - white people.

I agree "the conversation" IS going on!! And I loooooove it! But when ppl insist that any action or resource like this video is an overall good because it "starts a conversation" even if it does other harms, even unintended ones, I don't want that in my corner.

I grew up "in the trenches". Not only middle class teacher / stereotype / nerd people commit the indulgent crime of owning a computer.

Give me a BREAK, you phonies. You're the kind of people who idiotically argue that DV doesn't have a "class". It does too - rich people don't beat their kids and spouse as much and you know it. Unless you get all of your info from the women's studies department. Which is staffed by (generally) upper middle class types.

I'd wondered if that video would garner discussion on ILE/ILX...

IM Losted, I'm not trying to ignore you, I genuinely don't know where you're coming from so I don't know how to engage.

Following up from my other posts though I realize now that a fair statement would be, "I don't want my liberation to be bought with someone else's oppression." Now, the fact that I can say this is coming from a position of relative liberty already, ie I have enough liberation to move around and to a large extent live my life, so I can afford to step back sometimes and not take everything that's offered without inspecting it. For ppl who are or feel that they are struggling to survive, I don't expect the same things that I hope I require from myself. I respect their need to survive and protect themselves. This is subjective and personal.

I'm ANGRY with Hb and the makers of this video because they created a situation where I can't support a project that does SOME good work that I care about, that furthers a cause I deeply care about, because they haven't done the SMALL AMOUNT of interrogation that they would need to do to see that their goal of liberating women from street harassment is transactional. And I think liberation is antithetical to transaction--I don't think liberation can be bought AT ALL. Either we're all in this together or there is no "this."

But now that the project is out there and obviously resonating with some people, I do not begrudge people who are just now having their experiences validated the satisfaction of that support. I do convict the parent organization with having done a profoundly shitty job of making sure that their output isn't itself furthering someone else's oppression.

Give me a BREAK, you phonies. You're the kind of people who idiotically argue that DV doesn't have a "class". It does too - rich people don't beat their kids and spouse as much and you know it. Unless you get all of your info from the women's studies department. Which is staffed by (generally) upper middle class types.

― Threat Assessment Division (I M Losted), Friday, 31 October 2014 01:20

This is a genuinely weird statement to make. So weird, in fact, I'm going to turn it around and ask what your sources, and your info comes from, for making this statement.

Because as far as I can see, there's two angles that could lead to this equally erroneous belief. 1) people from a middle or upper class background, who wish to believe (as an expression of classism) that DV is a 'working class problem' and 'that never happens here!" 2) people from a working class background who want to discount the experiences of middle or upper class women ('Those women have nothing to complain about!") I have encountered this attitude on occasion from working class men who wish to discredit *all* feminism, as just being some hoity-toity middle class concern, in order to maintain their own gender privilege.

Violence against Women and Girls (I'll use this term because it shows things like harassment (street or otherwise) and DV as part of a continuum, an exercise of power and domination as expressed through the language of sex and control) does not have a class. The *form* of expression it may take is sometimes dependent on class because of what kind of access to women they are allowed is changed by men's class status. (as in orbit pointed out above, middle class men have access to office staff they can abuse in private, upper class men have domestic staff they abuse in their own homes.) Being middle or ruling class is not some kind of ~protective sphere~ that stops men from abusing women. But what class buys is it buys *privacy* and it buys *silence*. Men from higher classes do not just control women with catcalls and fists. They control them with fear - fear for their jobs, fear for their careers, fear for their professional reputations being ruined, fear of legal action if they do anything more than whisper their concerns to other women.

Where does my information come from? 'Women's studies'? (Well, it's funny how you discount that. After all, why would the study of women have anything useful to say about VAWG?) Ironically, at the moment I am trying to research this stuff in pursuit of a job. I've been looking at government statistics, women's shelters, charities, etc. What do they say?

Myth: It only happens in poor families on council estates.

Anyone can be abused, no matter where they live or how much money they have. Abused women come from all walks of life. You only have to think of the celebrities we hear about in the papers to realise that money cannot protect you from domestic violence.

Men who abuse women are as likely to be lawyers, accountants and judges as they are milkmen, cleaners or unemployed.

Where does my information come from? My own experiences. I have dated people from many different class backgrounds. Of the ones who were abusive or violent towards me - one was an Oxbridge educated solicitor at a Chancery Lane law firm. (I am going to assume you can translate this into an American milieu yourself.) The other was the trustafarian son of a millionaire. I come from an Upper Middle Class family. Upper Middle Class men beat their wives and molest children. My brother married into a 1%-er family. 1%-ers beat their wives and molest children. If it happens in lesser numbers, it is only because there are less of them in numbers. If it is reported less among the powerful and the wealthy, it is because powerful and wealthy men are able to buy privacy and buy silence.

It's one thing to say "there are more working class women, and they have less access towards resources, so agencies dedicated to helping them should direct their resources towards helping working class women." That is completely pragmatic. But when people paint VAWG solely as a Class Problem, or try to pretend it doesn't happen in "Our" classes, that makes me very, very suspicious of their motives.

To return to issues of race and street harassment. My own personal experience of it (which is, albeit limited, it's not something that has been an issue for me for a very long time) was that when it did happen, when I was still working in clubs/bars and riding a lot of night buses, the absolute *worst* perpetrators of it were packs of pissed-up, lairy, white, middle-class men. The encounters I dreaded were gangs of drunk bankers or lawyers hepped up on their own entitlement, spilling out of City pubs at closing time. That is the most visceral 'OMG, I'm going to get shouted at, abused, grabbed' fear I have ever experienced, when I was living in the East End. (Transatlantic translation: at that time, the neighbourhood that was the seething edge of gentrification.) Gentrification is absolutely about class, and class plays a very salient part in determining the *expression* of harassment, but the idea that white men or men from non-working class backgrounds don't perpetuate it is a flat-out lie.

And always, lies make me suspicious. I've seen a ton of stuff about Rob Bliss (the filmer of the video, mentioned above, but I do wonder if more links have disappeared behind the cut) floating about on twitter, and questioning his involvement, not with Hb, but with groups involved with gentrification. This is a man who has an agenda, and his agenda is gentrification and the resulting social cleansing that results is a deliberate part of his agenda. Time and again, men with agendas have shown themselves capable of *using* genuine women's issues as justifications of their own ends. These men are not actually interested in 'women's issues' and will quite happily throw WoC and working class women under the bus. Their interests are usually money (and all its accompanying props of preserving class and race privilege).

So, to cut an unnecessarily long story short, many of these issues *are* about class, but not in the ways that IM Losted is representing. It's about excluding the actual demographics of class and race (sometimes literally, such as the white street harassers who have been edited out of the video, sometimes metaphorically as in IM Losted's 'women's studies' comments) to paint VAWG as a class or race issue, and then using women and their struggles as a blunt instrument to advance deeply suspicious race and class agendas. I am not OK with that, even as I support the dialogues that said video has been stoking. (Stoking, rather than starting.)

You're the kind of people who idiotically argue that DV doesn't have a "class". It does too - rich people don't beat their kids and spouse as much and you know it.

http://www.popcenter.org/problems/domestic_violence/PDFs/Rennison&Welchans_2000.pdf

http://i60.tinypic.com/a1u5j4.png

guessing the unemployed are more likely to beat their wives, as they have that much more time on their hands and a lot less to lose

There is a difference between "rich people don't beat their kids as much" and "rich people don't beat their kids."

The translation of the former into the latter (with race included as an aspect of class) is at the heart of why so many people are finding this video a problem.

Men of privilege (race privilege or class privilege) find other ways to abuse and control women that go beyond street harassment and domestic violence. That does not mean that white men, or high income men never abuse women.

This has probably been posted before (a ton of stuff has rolled up under the cut) but I did find that criticism on why it's worth criticising Rob Bliss' agenda in making this video:

https://storify.com/Aut_Omnia/why-you-shouldnt-share-the-nyc

He is not about street harassment; he is about gentrification. Hence why he cut the white guys out.

Apologies if this is a repeat; it just luckily crossed my twitter again.

Tbh the bar for doing harm here is even lower than that--he doesn't have to be some evil genius with a clear ulterior motive. He just has to be thoughtless and coast on what he knows from being himself, a white dude. If he doesn't look any further than that, his projects will always be oppressive somehow because he'll always be erasing or silencing or worse, criminalizing some group of people he hasn't even spared a thought for.

PS: I know from Grand Rapids, believe me. It's hilarious that he did that video.

Is there a little more backup for the "this is all a plot to punish minorities and encourage gentrification" theory? Because it seems a little truthery to me.

er I guess what laurel said

Here's a change of topic, just because I'm interested: ARE iSIS Halloween costumes offensive?

http://gawker.com/a-childs-treasury-of-this-years-most-offensive-hallowee-1652874318

lol yes they are

They are just generic racist caricatures of people from the Middle East with guns added on.

What if I specifically dressed as this guy though

http://i.telegraph.co.uk/multimedia/archive/02942/wahid_2942025b.jpg

this is sure to be a very unpopular opinion, but i think it's strange how so many people are taking this quote from the slate article...

At the end they claim the woman experienced 100-plus incidents of harassment “involving people of all backgrounds.” Since that obviously doesn’t show up in the video, Bliss addressed it in a post. He wrote, “We got a fair amount of white guys, but for whatever reason, a lot of what they said was in passing, or off camera,” or was ruined by a siren or other noise. The final product, he writes, “is not a perfect representation of everything that happened.” That may be true but if you find yourself editing out all the catcalling white guys, maybe you should try another take.

...and translating it to "they edited out all the white guys" without a second thought, case closed. we don't know what raw footage they captured in the first place. it's a huge assumption to claim that there's a bunch of footage left on the cutting room floor of white guys saying stuff clearly, on camera, which they decided to cut. i kind of have a hard time believing that they have clear footage of a white guy saying "hey sexy" on camera and then didn't include it in the video. it's much more believable to me that they DO have lots of clips where the harasser is off camera and the audio is difficult to hear, and a result they didn't include it in the video. the footage was captured by having the film's subject walk behind a guy with a hidden camera in his backpack - that's a really messy process. i can't count the number of harassers in the clip because i'm at work, but there aren't even close to 100+. that means that tons of them were left off. one could argue that they should have included all 100+ incidents in the film, even if some of them had to be subtitled or if the people were off-camera or whatever, but...that would be a different film! it would have been much longer. it wouldn't have the same effect, and it almost certainly wouldn't have reached 15 million+ people, or whatever they're up to now. it's the filmmakers' right to use whatever clips they have to maximum effect.

i realize that Bliss is an asshole but it's kind of weird for people like Automnia (author of the storify article just above) to get enraged and leap to these conclusions without any evidence: "So this white guy, Rob Bliss, records a woman getting street harassment from loads of men, then cuts out most of the shit from white guys." and "A white guy takes the oppression of women and uses it as a tool to further the oppression of people of colour." jeez, hope Automnia never gets selected for jury duty!

"A white guy takes the oppression of women and uses it as a tool to further the oppression of people of colour."

Yes, I like to refer to this as "the history of the United States."

I mean it's 200 years later, can we please stop doing this? Get one goddamn clue, Mr Bliss. I read somewhere that he first noticed street harassment when his girlfriend expressed that it was happening to her, and her experiences are what motivated him to make this project. Where's her project? Why is this coming from a dude?

You know what men should be doing about street harassment? Talking to their men about how not to do it. That's it. It's an incredibly important job that only men can do! But we really don't need people like this guy taking up the air in the room with their pet projects, esp when they only noticed it was a problem when it involved "their" women. Ugh.

Yes, I like to refer to this as "the history of the United States."

totally, but it's another thing to take that general historical truth and apply it to a contemporary and specific person and incident, without evidence. that just doesn't feel right to me. i'm sure Bliss is a terrible person, but it's not right to accuse someone of a racist act without being able to prove it. and sorry, not accusing anyone here, which i should have been more clear about. it's more the blog thing where everyone is linking back to the Slate piece and citing it as proof that the racist white guy edited out all the white guys before maniacally cackling at the moon all night.